ABSTRACT
The extraordinary events of 9/11 led Tiziano Terzani (1938-2004), by then retired Asia correspondent who had withdrawn from the world and spent most of his time in solitude in the Indian Himalayas, to break his ‘hibernation’ and go back to writing – ‘not an article with a fixed number of lines and an attention-grabbing first sentence, but a letter written off-the-cuff, as if to a friend’ (Terzani 2002: 10) – a letter that was published on the front page of Corriere della Sera on 16 September 2001. A reply from Oriana Fallaci, published in Corriere on 29 September, made him finally take the decision to ‘go down to the valley’ on a journey that would take him to Pakistan, Afghanistan and India in order to witness the effects of the war on terror. The letters written during this journey, in which he tried to ‘let another voice speak, tell another side of the story, begin a debate so we can all be aware, so no-one can continue to claim nothing has happened’, were published as a book, Lettere contro la guerra, in 2002, achieving immediate success in Italy. Translations into French, German and Spanish quickly followed, and Terzani refers to the warm reception found in a continental Europe that ‘seemed extremely responsive to the neo-pacifist appeal of the “Letters”’as follows: ‘Wherever I went to talk about my experiences as an old war correspondent turned “Kamikaze for peace” (this was the title of a one-hour documentary by Swiss TV) big crowds gathered to listen and to discuss’ (ibid.: 2). However, all his attempts to publish the Letters in English failed, rejected by the English and American outlets that had published his previous books. Even when he made the English translation available to publishers and offered the book for free, the only publisher he could find for the work was in New Delhi, India Research Press (2002). This is, to this date, the only existing English version,
but to allow as many people as possible to have access to the book, Terzani also made it available for free on the internet.1
